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Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953, by Arnold Offner. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 626 pp. $28. Few postwar presidents are as highly regarded today as Harry Truman. The defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, the founding of NATO, and the enactment of the Marshall Plan are all credited in whole or in part to Truman and his advisors. The Pax Americana begins with Truman at Potsdam. It begins with the new security architecture and institutions of the postwar era. For Democrats, Truman provides the model for an activist foreign policy untainted by Vietnam and McGovernism. For Republicans, Truman was the progenitor of containment and a pioneer of robust defense spending. Scholars are less effusive but hardly uncomplimentary. No matter that Truman was manifestly unpopular among his contemporaries; the consensus judgment on his legacy in world affairs is unmistakably positive.
This troubles diplomatic historian Arnold Offner, whose new study, Another Such Victory, takes wide aim at the Truman consensus. According to Offner, Truman was a "parochial nationalist," whose presidency "created a rigid framework in which the United States waged long-term, extremely costly global Cold War."' His tenure "narrowed Americans' perception of the world political environment." It "intensified Soviet-American conflict, hastened division of Europe, and brought tragic intervention in Asian civil wars and a generation of Sino-American enmity."2 The Cold War, Offner would have us believe, was a hollow, ephemeral victory that recalls the words of King Pyrrhus himself "another such victory, and we are undone." A classic is thus invoked to characterize contemporary world politics after the Cold War's end.
The argument is deeply contrarian, but hardly innovative. Leftleaning Cold War historians advanced it decades ago; pre-war isolationists on the right pioneered it before them. It sometimes appears as a species of realism: that is, based not upon normative reasoning but on allegedly positive grounds, upon cost-benefit analysis, or upon the proposition that the United States has overcommitted itself and will be subject to the requisite blowback. Such arguments have their place in healthy public discourse. But the incarnation this study offers fails to reveal much that Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Powers did not already reveal years ago, in spite of drawing amply upon Truman's papers and those...